Drexel Heritage Bar Cart

While vintage Drexel Furniture dining tables, dressers and other pieces remain highly desirable for enthusiasts of mid-century modern design, the manufacturer's story actually begins decades before its celebrated postwar-era Declaration line took shape.

In 1903, in the small town of Drexel in the foothills of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, six partners came together to found a company that would become one of the country’s leading furniture producers. The first offerings from Drexel Furniture were simple: a bed, washstand and bureau all crafted from native oak wood, sold as a bedroom suite for $14.50.

One of Drexel’s early innovations was to employ staff designers, something the company initiated in the 1930s. This focus on design, which few other furniture companies were committing to at the time, allowed Drexel to respond to a variety of new and traditional tastes. This included making pieces inspired by historic European furniture, like the popular French Provincial–style Touraine bedroom and dining group that borrowed its curves from Louis XV-era furniture. Others replicated the ornate details of 18th-century chinoiserie or the embellishments of Queen Anne furniture. Always ready to adapt to new customer demands, during World War II, Drexel built a sturdy desk designed especially for General Douglas MacArthur.

In the postwar era, Drexel embraced the clean lines of mid-century modernism with the Declaration collection designed by Stewart MacDougall and Kipp Stewart that featured elegant credenzas and more made in walnut, and the Profile and Projection collections designed with sculptural shapes by John Van Koert. In the 1970s, Drexel introduced high-end furniture in a Mediterranean style.

Drexel changed hands and visions throughout the years. It was managed by one of the original partners — Samuel Huffman — until 1935, at which time his son Robert O. Huffman took over as president. It was then that the company began to expand, with several acquisitions of competitors in the 1950s, including Table Rock Furniture, the Heritage Furniture Co. and more.

With the manufacturer’s success — spurred by its embrace of advertising in home and garden magazines — it opened more factories in both North and South Carolina. By 1957, the company that had started with a factory of 50 workers had 2,300 employees and was selling its furniture nationwide.

Drexel underwent a series of name changes in its long history. Its acquisition of Southern Desk Company in 1960 bolstered its production of institutional furniture for dormitories, classrooms, churches and laboratories.

In the following decades, contracts with government agencies, hotels, schools and hospitals brought its high-quality furniture to a global audience. U.S. Plywood-Champion Papers bought Drexel Enterprises in 1968, and it became Drexel Heritage Furnishings.

In 2014, the last Drexel Heritage plant, in Morganton, North Carolina, closed its doors. The company rebranded as Drexel in 2017.

The vintage Drexel furniture for sale on 1stDibs includes end tables designed by Edward Wormley, walnut side tables designed by Kipp Stewart and lots more.

Forever a sleek and elegant furnishing that evokes luxury and sophistication, a vintage bar cart will prove both functional and fabulous in your living room.

Bar carts as we know them were originally conceived as tea trolleys — a modest-sized table on wheels, sometimes featuring both an upper and lower shelf — to help facilitate tea service during the Victorian era in England. Modern bar carts weren’t really a common fixture in American interiors until after the end of Prohibition in the 1930s, when they were rolled onto the sets of Hollywood films. There, they suggested wealth and status in the dining rooms of affluent characters.

As tough as the 1930s had been on the average working American, the postwar era yielded economic stability and growth in homeownership. Increasingly, bar carts designed by the likes of Edward Wormley and other furniture makers became an integral part of sunken living rooms across the United States in the 1950s.

Bar carts were a must-have addition to the sensuous and sleek low-profile furnishings that we now call mid-century modern, each outfitted with the finest spirits and savory snacks that people had to offer. And partially owing to critical darlings like Mad Men, vintage cocktail carts have since seen a resurgence and have even become a selling point in restaurants.

Bar carts not only boast tremendous utilitarian value but also introduce a fun, nostalgic dynamic to the layout of your space, be it in the bar area or elsewhere. In addition to showcasing your favorite bottles of rye and local small-batch gin — or juices and mocktail ingredients — there is an undeniable allure to stacking statement glassware, vintage martini cocktail shakers and Art Deco decanter sets atop your fully stocked mid-century modern bar cart. And one size or style doesn’t fit all — an evolution of cocktail cart design throughout history has yielded all manner of metal bar carts, rattan carts and more.

We invite you to add a few more dashes of class to cocktail hour — peruse the vast collection of antique and vintage carts and bar carts on 1stDibs today.